A Random Act of Kindness

Who won the week for me this week is a 60 year old relative stranger called Rod.

We actually only met him for the first time this morning, when he came round to help a friend of his pick up a heavy old terracotta planter from our front garden. We had inherited the home-made garden planter when we moved in to our new house but it’s really not to our taste, so we offered it to the youngest daughter of the family we bought the house from, incase she wanted to keep it for sentimental reasons as a memory of her dad. She decided she did indeed want it, and we arranged for her partner to come round this morning with his friend Rod to take it away.

We had a couple of large broken tree branches (taken down by a recent storm) stacked up in the back garden, topped up with a few more smaller cut down branches and other similar prunings, and as they were leaving with the planter Rod asked if we needed the branches taken to the local recycling centre. I told him we had intended to take them ourselves but hadn’t got round to organising transport yet, and amazingly he offered to come back later and take them for us.

We thanked him very much, and sure enough only an hour or so later he was back with his empty trailer and a large-toothed saw and giant loppers to cut the broken branches to a more manageable length for his trailer. We chatted easily together while we all helped load up the trailer, about the local area and the garden and the house, and before Rod left for the recycling centre we thanked him very much again. He drove off with a friendly ‘beep-beep’ and a wave, and we closed the gate behind him, amazed at experiencing such friendly helpfulness from someone we didn’t even know before today.

Such a random act of kindness from a relative stranger, and one for which we are so thankful. Right now we don’t even know his surname, but for us Rod definitely wins the week, with a huge smile of gratitude from both of us 🙂

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